At the Bampford School for Girls, conditions are Spartan, discipline is fierce, and love between students is the ultimate crime. Here, 16-year-old Rachel becomes trapped in a tangle of passions she does not fully understand, caught between a formidable headmistress and a passionate and defiant classmate.

"Manning has very considerable descriptive powers and can paint the landscape within as suggestively as the one without. . . . This is a very intelligent, sensitive, and compelling book." —Anthony Burgess, author of A Clockwork Orange

"Manning is a sensitive writer. She has not only a fine ear for prose but a fine eye for character. She has succeeded in creating . . . the world of the adolescent [searching for] an 'inner order behind a chaotic and unlovely existence.'" —New York Times Book Review

"Rosemary Manning's unjustly forgotten novel is a deft depiction of innocence and the forces of hypocrisy, paranoia, and self-hatred that betray innocence. It deserves to rank among the very best of the early- and mid-twentieth-century portrayals of girls' school love such as Olivia and Mädchen in Uniform." —Lillian Faderman, author of Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers

"Rosemary Manning writes with subtlety, intelligence, control, and great respect for words. . . . The Chinese Garden offers something of the misty, undefined evil that pervades The Turn of the Screw." —The New York Herald Tribune